Depending on how well you know us and/or how many social media platforms you are following us on, you might know that we weren't able to do much advertising for our crowdfunding campaign.
95% of our ads were rejected for "promoting alcohol". I would of course appeal the decision, but I would get notifications that the appeal was rejected and my ads were still not running.
ASIDE: The fact that we were able to raise the money we did without any ads was truly impressive. It speaks to how great our community is; everyone worked so hard to help us get the word out.
Fast forward to now! I quit my day job last month so I could give my projects (like this one!) the focus and energy they need to thrive. This means I had time to do things like getting set up to sell our products on Facebook and Instagram. I was feelings so energized and optimistic!
AND THEN. After spending a several days setting everything up, I woke up to this:
I can't even explain how frustrated I was, but I dutifully clicked through the appeal process and typed out an explanation that our entire brand was not-alcoholic, and that none of our products or recipes promoted the sale of alcohol.
The next day I got this:
Honestly, I cried.
Then I got a tip from a friend about how to get someone from FB on chat support to try to work these sorts of things out. After -- no joke -- two hours of cyclical and confusing conversation, the person I spoke with said they would escalate it for me.
Two days later, I got this:
SO GOOD RIGHT?? But then the next morning I got this:
I of course appealed AGAIN, then got this:
And it's not even just our drinks. Within two more days, a third of our Tarot art prints had also been taken down.
Every time I would get it sorted, things would get flagged again and I'd have to start all over from scratch (apparently it was not possible to put a note on our account??).
After talking to a few different people who work in digital marketing, we had to accept that this was going to keep happening and that it would hinder our ability to sell on Facebook or Instagram or be able to advertise our products basically at all.
So we decided we needed to change our name.
We had a lot of suggestions like "elixir" and "libations" but they just don't land with me. And I hate the very concept of "mocktails" so that was out.
So after a lot of brainstorming ... welcome to our new name, and our new branding!
The happy ending is that we genuinely love this name and design even more, now that we are used to it.
I know this is a pretty exhausting story! Thank you so much for reading it, and for sticking with us as we figure so many things out!